Lawmaker: Australia’s “Aborting Itself Out of Existence”
Written by Stephen on February 14th, 2006Citing estimates of 100,000 abortions a year, Danna Vale, a member of Prime Minister John Howard’s ruling coalition, told a press conference that Australians were “aborting ourselves almost out of existence.”
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Australia’s total fertility rate (TFR) has dropped from 3.5 in 1961 to 1.7 in 2005. [Replacement TFR is 2(children/couple)]
Someone’s been reading Mark Steyn. Good for her.
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I’ve made this comment before about the Western World aborting itself out of existence on political message boards and the libs went screaming saying I was nuts. The Western civilizations are aborting their children away while Muslims are having a dozen kids each. A second grader can do the math here and figure out what the end result will be if this doesn’t change.
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Stop the Death of the West and the murder of our children. End abortion now.
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If women are choosing to have abortions, then they clearly don’t want to go back to the time of having an average of 3.5 children. I’m confused: Is the goal to populate the state by forcing women to have more children that they clearly don’t want, by restricting abortions? I, for one, would rather not dedicate my life to reproducing citizens for the state — I can see why these remarks were controversial. It makes one wonder, then, if a fool proof birth control method were discovered tomorrow, would conservatives back it in favor of reducing abortions, or would it be seen as threatening since it puts reproductive choices in the hands of individual women? (Women who may choose to stop having children after the replacement rate.)
I don’t see what the solution is, if non-Muslim Australian women (or Western women in general for that matter) don’t see the need to have more than an average of around 2 children each.
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The solution, I would suggest, is to engage the culture on a fundamental level and change it. We need to ask why people want a family of 3 when they once wanted 4, 5, or even 6. Then, in identifying the problem, we should work to correct it.
Arnold Toynbee once said that “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.” Let’s not let western civilization kill itself.
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Nobody can afford to have a family that large anymore for many reasons.
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No one can afford it because people value things more than the duty they have to western culture to make it stronger and keep it from collapsing.
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Sam, I’m afraid you’re wrong on that one. Evidence A: Me and my 6 member family living in high cost-of-living northern Virginia. A friend family has 7 and lives not too far away. Mellora is right that people are spending the money elsewhere.
At the same time, I don’t think there is a duty to Western Civilization that compels you to have a large family. Rather, there are other reasons to support large families. Benefits to child rearing, emphasis on non-material goods and interpersonal relationships, etc.
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Well, I didn’t literally mean nobody, but most people can’t. You have to look at each family’s circumstances. If you are in a family where a parent makes a more than decent salary then that is a different situation. I come from a six person family myself, but my dad did pretty well and my mom also worked so they could afford four kids.
Higher taxes and overinflated costs of living are keeping people from being able to live a comfortable lifestyle and have a large family at the same time. That’s why so many people are on birth control. Additionally, the invention of “the pill” was what basically killed the 6 and 7 child family in the Western World. People had that many kids not so much because they wanted to, but because they couldn’t do much to prevent it.
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I’m pretty sure that the your “inflated cost of living” is more of an inflated idea of what standard one should live. There are so many things that we have that we don’t need: new cars, big tv’s, ipods, playstations, countless articles of clothing. Our idea of what is necessary is so off base because we don’t value our country and culture as much as we value the luxuries it offers.
You can’t blame it entirely on the invention of the pill, either. The pill would not be used if society didn’t find it appealing. Making the pill illegal (and abortion, for that matter) would not solve the problem of dropping birth rates. Something needs to change in western culture and it needs to change immediately.
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Morality and religion are the only keys to saving the West, and moral renewel and re-Christianization would most directly manifest itself in higher birth rates. If you consider yourself a conservative activist, there is one way you can do more than all the PAC’s, campaigns, blogs, and politicans put together. Get married, have as many kids as possible, raise them Christian (I would say Roman Catholic but I’ll agree to disagree with any dissenters on that), and put family and love over comfort and profit.
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Becky, you’re missing the point. We won’t let you choose to have children for the state, we will force you.
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While we can live our own lives in a conservative fashion, we also need to make a point that you can be successful while raising a large family. In doing so, you remove the desire to delay raising a family until you’re tapped out at working. The pill and abortion both have an impact, but so does delayed marriage and subsequent delayed childbirth.
So here’s my suggestion on how we do that. First, dump Ann Coulter as a role model. The lady’s 44, child-less, and single. Not the model if you want to encourage marriage and child-rearing in your 20s. Instead, let’s pull out old faithful… that’s right, Phyllis Schlafly. Think about: adored by conservatives, married with six kids, independently successful. There’s a role model for the young’uns.
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I agree with Stephen’s comment. Phylllis Schlafly is a true conservative female role model.
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Ah the conservative v. toid argument breaks out
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I of course come down in the Edmund Burke true conservative side against the toids
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I’m actually in Australia right now, and these comments haven’t yet made it to the newspapers or evening news. Curious.
As I read through these responses, I couldn’t tell if y’all were being serious, or if you were trying to parody the most absurd positions that the far right has ever taken. I think its probably a little of both.
There are claims here that women have a duty to have a great many children so that Western society isn’t destroyed by Muslim society. So, in order to save Western society from Muslim society, we’re adopting some of the worst parts of Muslim society by eliminating women’s rights and choice? That doesn’t seem right to me.
I’m not just talking about abortion or birth control. If a woman doesn’t want to have children and practices abstinence in order to accomplish this goal, how dare we tell her that she’s in the wrong?
Also, a major reason why people are having smaller families now is because infant mortality rate has dropped so much. If a family in the Dark Ages only had two or three kids, there was a high chance that all would die. If they had 7 or 8, some would likely live.
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I don’t think anyone was going to say we should use government to meet these ends.
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David, your post perfectly expresses what I would have loved to say. I’ve often been confused myself as to how becoming an incubator for the state is somehow upholding Western freedom. It scares me to even hear people suggest or joke that women should give over their own goals and interests in order to have as many children as possible. Also, as someone who actually thinks about how we are supposed to support such rapid population growth, I’m wondering where conservatives se this birth-rate challenge going. We’re at 6 billion people and counting — call me crazy, but at some point we’re going to run out of space. And as someone who actually enjoys seeing forests as opposed to strip malls and housing developments, I’d prefer not to live in a country or world buckling under a short-sighted policy that involves trying to compete for the highest birth rate.
In David’s spirit of hoping that these positions are parodies, I need only quote the above:
“Becky, you’re missing the point. We won’t let you choose to have children for the state, we will force you.”
Bench: Don’t even joke about “forcing” me to have children.
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Yeah, the whole argument that we need to stop abortion to protect the state seems a little fascistic. It is not quite as disgusting though as pro-aborts who see abortion as the only way to ensure a woman’s economic rights (or for that matter to protect Becky from ugly strip malls).
The argument against abortion should always come from a human rights perspective. Sure there are beneficial secondary consequences for the state, such as a higher birth rate, leading to more workers etc. But I don’t think these arguments are really valid as to whether or not abortion should be legal. If we start using utilitarian arguments to oppose abortion, then how do we argue that the fact that abortion will save social security is better than the argument that abortion decreases crime rates?
The question abortion boils down to is what exactly is being killed by an abortion?
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Mark, are you quite serious that you don’t think government would come into play?
Because, as far as I can tell, women aren’t beating down the doors to become a-baby-a-year-housewives (most can’t afford to even if they wanted to). So unless there’s governmental action (we shouldn’t forget that even giving women info. about birth control was illegal, in the US, a hundred years ago), I don’t see what anyone here is planning to do to change the birth rate. (And the proposal of setting up women with 6 children as role models doesn’t seem that great to me — I’m not buying it. I know too many women who are just as happy and successful with two kids.)
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Of course not, Mark. We’re talking about conserving western culture, not making the government bigger.
An ideal society would be one in which women, like Phyllis Schlafly, were admired for being wonderful mothers and great wives, along with the success they had in their careers. This is quite different than the society that the feminist movement has birthed in the west. Women who stay home are told that they should feel “trapped” by their surroundings and that they are unsuccessful because they chose their correct role as homemaker. In this ideal society, abortion and abortifacients would not be seen as desirable.
So no - it’s not about taking away a woman’s “right” to murder her child, David, it’s about changing the culture so that when a woman becomes pregnant, instead of considering whether to take her child’s life or not, a birth will be seen as a great source of joy.
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“Yeah, the whole argument that we need to stop abortion to protect the state seems a little fascistic. It is not quite as disgusting though as pro-aborts who see abortion as the only way to ensure a woman’s economic rights (or for that matter to protect Becky from ugly strip malls).”
John, do tell me that you know that joke was in very bad taste. How on earth did you come up with the idea that I think women should have abortions in order to keep population growth down? I’m all for family planning that takes a woman’s desires into account, NOT for some straight out of China policy on forcing women to abort pregnancies. The only reason I brought in the idea of overpopulation, was the very real fact that the planet isn’t designed to support humankind reproducing that rapidly. As we face very real problems (energy, clean water, deforestation, extinction of species, I could go on), I think it’s extremely short sighted to think that having as many children as possible is going to solve our problems.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting women who WANT large families should go and have abortions due to environmental concerns. However, encouraging women to have more children than they would have chosen, is what I’m calling out as ridiculous at the level of policy and ideology.
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Becky, they won’t be happy if they have to live under the rule of a mullah because fundamentalist muslims outnumber people in countries in the west.
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Becky, no one was arguing that abortion should be banned to save Western Culture, just as you were not arguing that abortion should be mandatory to save the environment.
The point I was trying to make was that arguments about culture and environment clearly pale in comparison to the argument about whether or not abortion kills a human being.
Is it fair to say that I caricatured your position the same way you caricatured the position of some on this post?
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“This is quite different than the society that the feminist movement has birthed in the west. Women who stay home are told that they should feel “trapped” by their surroundings and that they are unsuccessful because they chose their correct role as homemaker.”
M Taylor, I’m sure that when you wrote “their correct role as homemaker,” you felt a twinge of doubt. What about women who (gasp) don’t want children? What about women who (double gasp) can conceive of a life in which they have a career? Or women who (dear Lord, can it be true?!) actually DON’T see their correct role in life as fixing PB sandwiches and vacuuming? The reason feminists saw the home as a trap, was because they felt it was a trap when it was forced upon all women, women who weren’t allowed equal opportunities to find fulfillment in college, a career, etc. You seem to have missed the point that it was women, in homes, who started the feminist movement.
Furthermore, I doubt many feminists today would tell women that, by virtue of choosing to become homemakers, they are thereby unsuccessful and trapped. Most feminists want women to have equal choices and opportunities. And, as you may have noticed from my diction, the point of feminism is in the possibility of CHOOSING to stay home.
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“Becky, no one was arguing that abortion should be banned to save Western Culture [...]”
Really, no one is arguing that? Because, yes I understand the position of seeing the fetus as a life with rights (even if I don’t agree with it), but the article about the comments on abortion and a decline of the West seemed very much to be drawing the conclusion that, fewer abortions means more births, which means helping to “save the West.” That’s what makes the article so controversial. And the above posts seem to go further in hoping to coerce women to have more children than they obviously are choosing to do at the moment. Which in my mind, is something of an ethical problem.
“Is it fair to say that I caricatured your position the same way you caricatured the position of some on this post?”
Yes, you caricatured in that you distorted my argument and suggested I drew a conclusion which I did not. On the other hand, I think I caricatured in the sense of exaggerating something that was already in the posts, in order to show where the logic was failing. A perfect example, I think, would be my attempt to be fair by quoting M Taylor above, and then showing that the logical conclusions of that quote are quite questionable.
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Choices John Supports a Legal Right to:
Abstinence
Pre-marital Sex
Adoption
Motherhood
Homemaking
Careers
Contraception (that doesn’t kill a human life)
Choices John Does Not Support a Legal Right to:
Killing people
Wow, I’m like the most pro-choice person in the world.
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Becky,
I’ll say it again: Your argument in favor of legal abortion because it will prevent overpopulation is the converse of the argument of opposing abortion because it leads to cultural suicide.
I did not touch the idea that women should be homemakers. I agree with you that it should be a choice to be a homemaker. But feminists have denigrated this choice in their quest for “equality” (i.e. money and power).
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I didn’t ever say that abortion should be legal to protect from overpopulation. I said that we shouldn’t advocate having huge families, or limit women’s CHOICES in how many children they have. One of my reasons for saying this, is partly due to the environment (ie, practical, material reasons why trying to raise our birth rate to, oh, say, double the replacement rate, isn’t very well informed). The main problem with advocating/coercing/forcing women into having more children than they want, is very much an ethical problem in my mind. My example of the environment is subsidiary, pointing out that a policy of competing with Muslim countries for the highest birth rate is ridiculous and short sighted.
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“My example of the environment is subsidiary,”
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Just as saving Western civilization is subsidiary to the ethical question at hand.
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I still don’t see these as being equivalent — I’m not advocating we save the environment BY having abortions. And many are advocating that we should do away with abortion in part because it means that women have fewer children, thereby threatening the West (supposedly).
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Let me put it another way: I don’t think any woman having an abortion should be thinking about the environmental impact.
On the other hand, people on this threat are obviously advocating that women having an abortion think about the risk of the West declining.
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Hahaha! Becky, dear, you have done an excellent job of representing your education. As a conservative, pro-life female who has no intention of having many many children to save western civilization I have very much enjoyed this debate.
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Mr. Braunlich,
I had never made the connection - between your named, when featured at CPAC for the pro-life organization, and your name as being one of the ‘Save the GOP’ bloggers. I am glad that you’re writing for this fine site… And it was a pleasure to have met you at CPAC. I was the one who purchased the second-to-last copy of the Reagan booklet; I returned the nicer-looking one I purchased for the more-creased one that was still on the table, so that you could use the better one for your raffle. I hope that your fundraising and recruitment efforts went well at CPAC, and congratulations on all the progress that it’s clear you’ve already been making. Please keep up the excellent work, and let us know what we (at the Illinois capital city CR chapter) can do to assist you in your great efforts.